Friday, March 6, 2015

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN

(This feature is part of TRUCK’s Theme Issue on the List or Catalog Poem. You can go HERE for an Index of the Participating Poets.)

In
the House of the Hangman 1878

Still, it will take me a while to list violinists,
though the first one who comes to mind is Robert Mealy who plays with
Quicksilver, Trinity Wall Street, and others. Most fluid, relaxed, and
effective technique I’ve seen, and I wish Jesse Kotansky would go to one of
Robert’s clinics because I would enjoy seeing how Jesse might incorporate some
of Robert’s techniques into his distinctly personal style. Robert is at
Juilliard now but we’ve known him for decades and seen his style evolve.
Elizabeth Wallfisch is another very interesting violinist in terms of
technique. Rather different from Robert. Jesse Kotansky has dreadful technique
if evaluated critically, but it works perfectly for him. Rob Diggins has a
gorgeous, relaxed flow when he plays. Oh, and one violinist I haven’t heard
live yet but have recordings of and expect to enjoy live someday: Helene
Schmidt. Oops. I left John Holloway off the list. Ditto for Andrew Manze and
Monica Huggett. They are all splendid, with radically opposite body types. I
could go on for a while. Manze is retired now -- he was amazing at fast
lyricism. Holloway is a powerhouse. Huggett is a charmer, never the very best
but always a pure delight to watch and hear. She has presence on stage. Someone
younger I haven’t seen in person is Amandine Beyer, but I enjoy listening to
her CDs. Just fun stuff to watch -- it is standard to watch other musicians in
order to see yourself more clearly.

And
so when you read

Wait until you have read the next line—

Then it is safe to go on reading.

One wish may hide another.

One
dog may conceal another

On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you’re
not necessarily safe;

One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs
and on the Appia

Antica one
tomb

May hide a number of other tombs.

One
bath

may hide
another bath

As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain

One idea may hide another: Life is simple

And one dream may hide another as is well known,
always, too.

Pause
to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit
by the next one. It

can be
important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was
already there.

Like Tuğçe Albayrak. Tuğçe was a 22-year-old German
woman. One night, she was at a McDonalds and heard two teenage girls being
harassed by three men in a bathroom. The restaurant was crowded, and many
people heard what was happening, but no one did anything to help. Tuğçe fought
her way into the bathroom and stopped the men from attacking the girls. But one
of the men followed Tuğçe outside and beat her into a coma. Her parents turned
off the life support machines on her 23rd birthday. This story is about Tuğçe,
but it’s also about much more. In the movement to end violence against women,
there are myriad heroes, people committing acts of unspeakable bravery every
day, people whose names we’ll never know. I wonder, Eileen, can one name
constitute that list poem I owe you? At this point, I have not telephoned
anyone. The leper colony we drove through on the last night, to buy Ayurvedic
toothpaste from the Ram Sharnam store … I began to make a film, thinking how
much the colorful blue and pink quarters resembled the architecture of Taos.
But no, he said. This is a leper colony. The Gandhi colony. Prime real estate.
The lepers have been displaced, bit by bit, by forces of capital. Businesses
that took over or bribed current residents for a lease: proliferate. Thus, a mixed
space. And the air. So incredibly polluted and real. The thing you become,
breathing it in. And I can’t think about the month of April and the shattered
apple blossoms of Brooklyn.

Paused here on the way to the Indian grocery store.
Turmeric, moong daal, kishmish. The mountains looked weirdly violet and the
clouds displayed an eagle shaped portal of blazing light. Was I dead? No, I was
dreaming of a hybrid city. It was Berlin but in the middle was a moving
escalator that was in Tokyo. And it was a cultural festival. Margit Galater and
Matias Viegener were dancing together in an improvised movement piece holding
large pieces of blue watercolour paper with writing on it that was both German
and Japanese. Andrea Spain was discussing literary philosophy in the toilets.
The toilets were in Johannesburg. This is such a quiet life. Why Tokyo? Hiromi
Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank
came from Action Books in an envelope, like a block of cocaine. How the
“rushes”: a vegetal complex of grasses: might start bleeding beneath their legs
or from their seams. “... the grasses growing in the wasteland bloomed with
yellow flowers, but the flowers quickly wilted and became red, the clusters of
rushes on the riverbank still had not gone into heat ...” Is the prairie a kind
of monkey, exposing its rump to any passerby? I scan the trail for late season
rattlesnakes. I love that the book ends with a botanical index: “A Guide
to the Plants in this Book.” “Sometimes,” I overhear him say, “I want to riot
for riot’s sake.” What else? Formless and ancient hydrocarbons from the depths
of our planet move beneath Los Angeles, unexpectedly setting fire to sidewalks
and burning whole businesses to the ground. What else? Fallen Fruit, an
art collective formed in 2004 by Viegener, David Burns, and Austin Young, has
worked — according to their website — “with fruit as a material or medium” and
has sought to “imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” The
fruit that Viegener seeks isn’t stolen, like Saint Augustine’s, but is
available by the divine right of usufruct. I could compare his formal corpuscle
(stanza) of 25 to the blessed coterie of 36 souls who will save the world
(“When I was a kid I read about the Lamed Vavniks,36
righteous people on whom the world depends — but we don’t know who they are”);
or to the sonnet’s healing constraint, an S/M contract, of 14; but a more logical
comparison would be to the psychoanalytic hour, the 50-minute slice, my mother
said women would run across lanes of traffic just to touch my hair. “Once I saw
Dolly Parton in a restaurant, Patina. She sat behind me; as soon as I knew she
was there, I could feel her vibrations through my chair.” This Dolly Parton
observation is number 22; number 23, in this sequence, is “She’s tiny.” Tiny,
too, is the sentence in which her tininess appears. This lightness of tone
introduces a plainspokenness, a climate of the commensensical, the copacetic,
the comfortable, that is Californian, but also Benjaminian (Walter Benjamin,
were history kinder to him, might have had a happy third act in Hollywood,
playing tennis with Arnold Schoenberg) — I mean, parataxis, like a line- or
stanza break, gives rest cure within the work itself, as if
the respite offered by yoga’s corpse pose could exist within literature, too (The
Birds doesn’t lead to Interiors; Interiors doesn’t
lead to Body Double.) Parataxis allows Viegener to do justice to
sex’s randomness, but also to the sublimity of this particular guy landing
right here in my lap; parataxis allows Viegener to push a “sex” argument that
is more relaxed and satori-filled than anything Foucault could have imagined —
a body-without-organs weightlessness, (like apples in a tragically complicated
orchard) sex everywhere, theory everywhere, death everywhere. “I am so tired of
making lists I could cry. I’m tired of trying to get people’s attention. I just
want to shut up and go to sleep.” “I once saw Alanis Morissette naked at
Esalen.” To use another unruly (and evasive?) metaphor: I drink German
romanticism through any straw. I mean,

1 Adam begat Seth; and Seth, Enos,

2 Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered,

3 Henoch, Methuselah, Lamech,

4 Noe, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

5 The sons of Japheth were Gomer, Magog, Madai, and
Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.

6 Forsooth the sons of Gomer were Ashchenaz, and
Riphath, and Togarmah.

7 And the sons of Javan were Elishah, and Tarshish,
Kittim, and Dodanim.

8 The sons of Ham were Cush, and Mizraim, Put, and
Canaan.

9 And the sons of Cush were Seba, and Havilah,
Sabta, and Raamah, and Sabtecha. And the sons of Raamah were Sheba, and Dedan.

10 And Cush begat Nimrod; this Nimrod began to be
mighty in [the] earth.

11 And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and
Lehabim, and Naphtuhim,

12 and Pathrusim, and Casluhim, of which the
Philistines and Caphthorim went out, or came. (and Pathrusim, and Casluhim, and
Caphthorim, from whom the Philistines came.)

13 And Canaan begat Sidon, his first begotten son
(his first-born son), and Heth,

14 and (the) Jebusite, and Amorite, and Girgashite,

15 and Hivite, and Arkite, and Sinite,

16 and Arvadite, and Zemarite, and Hamathite.

17 The sons of Shem were Elam, and Asshur, and
Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram. And the sons of Aram were Uz, and Hul, and Gether,
and Meshech.

19 And to Eber were born two sons; the name of
[the] one was Peleg, for the land was parted in his days (for the land was
divided in his days); and the name of his brother was Joktan.

20 And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and
Hazarmaveth, and Jerah,

21 and Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah,

22 Ebal, and Abimael, and Sheba,

23 and Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab; all these
were the sons of Joktan.

24 Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah,

25 Eber, Peleg, Reu,

26 Serug, Nahor, Terah,

27 Abram; this is Abraham.

28 The sons of Abraham were Isaac, and Ishmael.

29 And these be the generations of them; and these,
begotten, begat

Macy’sHickory Farms

Circuit CityGNC

Payless ShoeSourceThe Body Shop

SearsEddie Bauer

Kay JewelersPayless ShoeSource

GNCCircuit City

LensCraftersKay Jewelers

CoachGymboree

H&M

RadioShack

GymboreeThe Body Shop

Hickory Farms

Coach

The Body ShopMacy’s

Eddie BauerGNC

Crabtree & EvelynCircuit City

GymboreeSears

Foot Locker

Land’s End.

And it’s official, they’ve found the remains of one
of the 43 students, Alexander Mora Venancio, whose father reported that his
son’s body was burned and that experts identified it by a fragment of bone and
a tooth. On that afternoon, my heart was silently bleeding as I knocked a hole
in the shop’s wall. I lived in a great big city but increasingly had found that
I was having difficulty walking through the doors. Again, it wasn’t a matter of
their size, nor mine, but of something else entirely. You see, I am one of
those rare people who actually remember being born. Then I choked on – someone
had to take my forearm and get me belly up. I looked like this. I turned on my
head. I WILL NOT PROFIT FROM THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS. Sometimes, around dawn, I
was sure I could hear the snake wriggling in its cage, making a sound akin to
dry glue sliding through sawdust, winking his lower eyelids one eye at a time.
I rang for my stop, but when it came time to exit the train, once again I found
that I could not fit through the door. Several people gave me recommendations,
until I settled on the idea of visiting a volcano that was supposed to possess
many rare qualities (apparently it made the sound of a human breathing in and
out). These days I’m finding it difficult to stay put inside my own skull. Why
the other day, I wrote, I was watching some swans swim around a small pond
during my lunch break, and I swore that for a brief moment I couldn’t fit into
my own skull. This had nothing to do with size. I was unwrapping a sandwich and
suddenly flashed on myself washing my hands with a stub of old white soap,
which I had done about ten minutes earlier. Then for a brief moment I was
convinced I saw my own thoughts steaming in the grass, and I thought the swans
were vultures, but this didn’t frighten me. If only we knew with certainty that
our effect on the world was a good one. Now grab opposite hand to ankle,
extending each leg. I had to get it right. My body had to. It was a matter of
rolling forward. Like, “why is a mouse sad,” but always with a post-authentic
authenticity, a new sincerity, that reminds us of when Lil’ B raps about the
beauty of a little turtle (or maybe Drake). The story of how he discovered
Instagram is typical. During a breakfast in 2012 with Ryan Trecartin, the video
artist downloaded the app onto Obrist’s phone (without asking). Next, Trecartin
posted to his Instagram followers that H.U.O. had signed up. Obrist was
curious, but he wondered what to do with the new tool. Inspiration was sparked
by other well-known friends. On a visit to Normandy, he went for a walk with
Etel Adnan. During a rainstorm, they stopped at a café, and she wrote him a
poem, by hand. This made Obrist remember Umberto Eco’s comments on how
handwriting was vanishing; he also thought of marvellous faxes he had received,
all handwritten, from J. G. Ballard, when he interviewed him, in 2003. Adnan’s
handwritten poem became one of Obrist’s first Instagram posts. Soon afterward,
he remembered that another friend, the artist Joseph Grigely, who is deaf, uses
Post-It notes to communicate; they are often incorporated into his art.